Great Balls of Fire

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It seems that I've decided to follow up on this business after all. Look out world, and prepare to suffer the consequences of my incessant ramblings. I mentioned writing up some kind of synopsis of the European adventure, but I'm a bit too lazy to summarize 28 days of travel for now... so deal with it for the time being. It'll happen.

I saw War of the Worlds last night, with an equally flabbergasted Graham and Gosfield. If you haven't seen the movie, I'm about to ruin it for you... although not nearly as much as one Steven Spielberg did. This guy cannot end a movie... to the point of absurdity. Ridiculous. Sitting there for two hours, I thought that Spielberg had finally managed to make an entertaining flick that wasn't uber-sappy... he managed to kill off someone close to the main character, earth was thoroughly fucked, and we were drawing ever closer to the inevitable fall of the aliens thanks to causes independent of mankind - and then it happened.

He ended the movie in five minutes. Five minutes. Forget a classic culmination; it seems like Spielberg just ran over budget and prematurely ejaculated all over the screen. So, let's now sort out what happened:

1. The aliens spend the entire duration of the movie obliterating everything and anything that remotely resembles a human settlement, going so far as to search wreckage for humans to kill for their farming purposes...only to leave an upper-class neighborhood in Boston completely intact. This makes perfect sense, of course, because the luck of the Irish prevails over aliens every time.
2. Did I mention that this block happens to be exactly where Tom Cruise's ex-wife's parents happened to live, and that that's exactly where she happened to have set out when the movie started? And this isn't even getting to the fact that they emerge from their house to see Tom Cruise and the rubble that is the REST OF BOSTON like they had just finished a rousing game of Monopoly and nothing had been going on in the outside world. "Ghastly business this invasion, you know. Simply mortifying. Lovely that you could make it, chap."
3. The son emerges and reunites with his father. Oh, by the way: the son is the DEAD character I was referring to earlier, you know, when I thought the movie was actually trying. You see, Robby (a name warranting instant death, by the way) was at odds with Tom Cruise and, for one reason or another, wanted to watch/join the futile assault being launched on the alien battleshits (I have no better term, sorry). Tom Cruise tries to hold him back, but ultimately fails, at which point you see the ENTIRE hill go up in a wave of fire, with tanks shattering and jeeps rolling away as flaming hunks of scrap metal. A blazing inferno, if you will, from which nothing living escaped. Except for the son, of course, but rather than construct a weak explanation for how the son managed to emerge unscathed and end up in Boston without running into any other Martians...
4. ... the movie just ends. Suddenly Morgan Freeman is narrating, telling us that God placed bacteria on this earth to protect man and something about no man ever dying in vain. That was mighty thoughtful of god, don't you think? It's time like this that I wish there was a way of expressing a blank stare through text, because I was, and still am, utterly dumbfounded.

It's good that they stuck to the actual story (aliens dying of the flu), but couldn't they show this to us? Couldn't an alien have leapt out of nowhere, incinerated the evil step-father douche with his ray gun (or Tom Cruise, same effect), only to have Dakota Fanning sneeze on the alien...at which point the alien would keel over and explode? Or, say, anything that didn't involve the worst ending ever? I'm completely willing to look other plot holes - such as aliens invading planet earth in the nude (despite apparently watching us for years and knowing about things like the mother-fucking plague) or the fact that an advanced alien race placed death machines deep underground before the rise of humanity in order to take over the planet...once the resident dominant race progressed several millennia and had some semblance of technology with which to defend itself - but how was it possible to mess up an ending this badly? Man. End rant.

On the plus side, you'll be happy to know that they now sell a soda size that's bigger than my head. It's a relief to know that, if aliens do invade, we'll be able to bomb the hell out of them by using artillery-size soda containers... personally, I can't wait until this "Xtra-Large" size gets trumped by the Stanley fucking Cup Soda, available for only a quarter more! It's not like hockey will be needing it anytime soon.

Oh, and is there anyone out there who wants to join the devoid mess of Hollywood unoriginality by uniting with me in the creation of my movie project? I call it Sequel: The Sequel. Part II. Spielberg is directing.

Over and out.